the eric update – day 10: care. kangaroo style.

so i guess you really can’t prepare mentally for what you’re going to experience in the nicu. yesterday we had no idea we’d spend the day getting our son to breath and today we thought we’d probably walk in and find him on the vent.

instead the nicu nurse exclaimed, “how’d you like to try some kangaroo care today!”

it was one of those moments where you want to start running laps around the nicu stations yelling, “yeeeeeeehaaaaaaawwwww!” but you don’t. because that would be rude and self indulgent. not everyone else is having such a good day. so you just walk over to your station with a certain jaunt to your step and get ready for Another Perfect Moment. incidentally, this is a good example of the subtleties and nuances that one must observe while becoming a ‘nicu parent’. you’re in a fish bowl with a half a dozen people on their own emotional rollercoasters and you’re all simultaneously trying to figure out how to “become” a parent in front of complete strangers.

kangaroo care is simply a way of holding a premature baby so that there is skin-to-skin contact. the process is fairly simple – or as simple as you can get when you’re holding a baby who has attached a variety of sensors, wires and tubes; eric, wearing only a diaper, is placed against mine or kris’ bare chest. in addition to providing both parents with a great way to bond with your child, it has been proven to bestow a range of physiological benefits to the child, from stabilizing the baby’s heartbeat, temperature and breathing to boosting a premature baby’s brain development. and it’s a whole lot of fun.

after all the kangaroo care, he looked completely content and i noticed that he seemed to have much more fuzz on his face.

if you look close you can see that his eyelashes and eyebrows are coming in.

he strikes a thoughtful, if a bit fuzzy, pose.

kris held him for an hour and indeed, his breathing and heart rate improved, as evidenced by a lack of apnea alarms. of course, as soon as the nurse put him on my chest, his oxygen dropped and we basically spent 10 minutes trying to get him to breath deeper before giving up and putting him in his bed. feeling like i got the short end of the kangaroo care stick, i decided to give him a massage with an ointment that smooths his skin, prevents water loss and helps him retain heat.

Conflux :: A Confluence of Curiousness

i’m not sure how to square these findings with the fact that i’ve long said that in a parallel universe very close to our own i live alone in cabin in the middle of nowhere writing manifestos: “The effect of population density on life satisfaction was therefore more than twice as large for low-IQ individuals than for high-IQ individuals,” they found. And “more intelligent individuals were actually less satisfied with life if they socialized with their friends more frequently.”

the heart warming fable of thanksgiving, unsurprisingly, ends up being a whole lot more complicated than some of us were taught and answers the nagging question of how squanto spoke perfect english when the pilgrims arrived and what was happening during the 100 year interim between columbus and the pilgrims ( spoiler: it involves human trafficking, enslavement and villages being wiped out ). and if you’re a stickler for tradition, you should put ditch the turkey and cranberry sauce for salted pork and olives since the spanyiards were the first to celebrate thanksgiving 50 years before the pilgrims.

“…researchers from a Bosch startup called Deepfield Robotics presented a paper on “Vision-Based High-Speed Manipulation for Robotic Ultra-Precise Weed Control,” which has like four distinct exciting-sounding phrases in it.”IEEE Spectrum

after updating to iOS 9 and el capitan i’ve been having troubles synching photos from my iphone to my macbook air. the mac would recognize the iphone but no photos would show up in the photos application or image capture. it was driving me nuts. turns out, if you have non-apple services like dropbox running that sync your photos to non-icloud services you have to turn them off.

having run a half a dozen marathons, i can’t imagine finishing in 3:05. even more unimaginable in full amish garb so kudos to leroy stolzfus. the whole article is great read but now i want to know more of the backstory on why he started to run: “A few years ago, Stolzfus got “involved with some stuff” he said he shouldn’t have. His brother-in-law suggested he start running instead when he was tempted. He took the suggestion to heart, and went out for a run.”

huh, who knew edward tufte has a farm with 234-acres of landscape sculpture fields that he opens to the public once a year. i’d love to make a trip. and i also love the article’s description of tufte, “[he] is also known as a genius of data visualization, professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale, an author of books on information design, and a hater of PowerPoint.

“The Chagossian people have a word, in their Creole language, for heartbreak: sagren. It is a profound sorrow which refers to the loss of a home, and the impossibility of returning to it. As we build new worlds with our technologies, knitted from fiber-optic light and lines of code, it is incumbent on us to ensure it does not reproduce the erasures and abuses of the old, but properly accounts for the rights and liberties of every one of us.”citizen-ex